IN BRIEF:

Free tools to check creepy online ads

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Brian X Chen and Natasha Singer, February 22, 2016, International New York Time,

Feb 21 2016, 21:28pm ist

updated: Feb 22 2016, 00:03am ist

Say you’re doing a Web search on something like the flu. The next thing you know, an ad for a flu remedy pops up on your Web browser, or your video streaming service starts playing a commercial for Tylenol.

The content of those ads is no coincidence. Digital ads are able to follow people around the Internet because advertisers often place invisible trackers on the websites you visit. Their goal is to collect details on everywhere you go on the Internet and use that data to serve targeted ads to your computer, smartphone and connected television.

This global commercial surveillance of consumers is poised to become more extensive as tech companies expand into the Internet of Things, a category that includes wearable computers and connected home appliances like smart thermostats and refrigerators. Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Google can already follow users from device to device because people log in to their services with the same IDs on various gadgets.

For other marketing companies, tracking people on multiple Internet-connected devices has become a holy grail. The process is complex, because some lack the direct relationship with people that the giant tech companies already have. Only about 6 percent of marketers can reliably track a customer on all of that customer’s devices, but advertisers are working toward the goal.

“Our privacy is completely under assault,” said Jeremiah Grossman, the founder of WhiteHat Security, a security firm.

So what better time to get a head start on defending yourself against Web snoops? Many companies offer tools to help obscure your digital footprints while you’re browsing the Web.

We researched and tested four tracker blockers and found their results varied widely. In the end, the app Disconnect became our anti-tracking tool of choice.

When you visit websites, these companies typically pick out your browser or phone using technologies like cookies, which contain unique alphanumeric identification tags that can enable trackers to identify your activities as you move from site to site. To sell ads delivered to certain categories of consumers, like suburban singles looking for romance, companies may sync these ID tags to pinpoint individuals.

The downside is, your browsing history may contain sensitive information about your health concerns, political affiliations, family problems, religious beliefs or sexual habits.

“More than just being creepy, it’s a huge violation of privacy,” said Cooper Quintin, a privacy advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit that also offers the anti-tracking tool Privacy Badger. “People need to be able to read things and do things and talk about things without having to worry that they’re being watched or recorded somewhere.”

We took a close look at four free privacy tools: Ghostery, Disconnect, RedMorph and Privacy Badger. We tested them with the Google Chrome browser on the top 20 news websites, including Yahoo News, CNN, The Huffington Post and The New York Times.

The tracker busters generally work in similar ways. You download and install an add-on for a Web browser like Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. The anti-tracking companies each compile a list of known Web domains that serve trackers or show patterns of tracking services. Then when someone connects to a website, the tools prevent the browser from loading any element that matches their blacklist.

Ghostery, a popular tracker blocker, was the most difficult to set up. When you install it, it asks you to manually select the trackers you want to block. Our problem with that approach is that there are hundreds of trackers, and most consumers probably won’t recognize the vast majority of them, putting the onus on users to research which specific services they might wish to block.

Scott Meyer, the chief executive of Ghostery, said this had been a deliberate design choice. When trackers are blocked, parts of websites may not function, so it is less confusing to let users experiment and decide which ones to block on their own, he said.“We block nothing by default,” he said. “That’s in direct contrast to other companies who are saying, ‘We’re turning everything off and let you turn whatever you want back on.’ That’s way too complex for users.”

The tracker blocking tool RedMorph takes the opposite approach. It blocks every tracking signal it can detect and lets people decide which ones to allow. For parents concerned about their children’s Internet use, RedMorph also offers a service to filter out certain sites or block certain swear words or other language they find inappropriate.

“When you go home, you lock the door and you may pull down the shades at night,” said Abhay Edlabadkar, the chief executive of RedMorph. “You should have the same level of privacy control over your Internet activities.”

In our tests, RedMorph was the most thorough with blocking trackers. It blocked 22 of them on USAToday.com, whereas Privacy Badger blocked seven, Disconnect blocked eight and Ghostery detected eight.

But in the process, RedMorph caused the most collateral damage. It blocked some videos on the websites for CNN, USA Today, Bleacher Report, The New York Times and The Daily News. It also broke the recommended reading list on Business Insider and a Twitter box on BuzzFeed.

For people who run into issues loading websites, the company offers an “Easy Fix” button to stop blocking a website’s trackers, but that’s hardly an ideal solution when it causes so many websites to malfunction. Edlabadkar of RedMorph said the tool was blocking some videos or recommended reading lists because they were loading only after a tracker had been loaded first.

That leaves Privacy Badger and Disconnect. Privacy Badger detects third-party domains that users are connecting with when they’re loading a website and blocks those domains only if they are determined to be tracking you. Its widget shows sliding bars of trackers it has detected. The ones in red are blocked and the green ones are allowed.

Disconnect takes a similarly nuanced approach. The company said some tracking was fair and necessary for a website to work properly — for example, if a site like The New York Times is using analytics to collect information about readers, as it describes in its privacy policy. However, Disconnect will block trackers from third parties that are collecting, retaining or sharing user data. On its website, it publishes lists of trackers it blocks and those it allows, along with explanations of its policy. In the end, we picked Disconnect as our favourite tool because it was the easiest to understand. It organises the types of tracking requests it is blocking into different categories: advertising, analytics, social media and content.

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